flowy.live
So - it's quite simple. It's a walkie-talkie with a way to play back the last 24 hours. A new medium of communication for active teams.
We have released for Mac and Windows.
Any feedback or thoughts would mean the world to us!
Open to a feedback session? https://calendly.com/arjun-flowy/onboarding
Appreciate all of you, Arjun Patel arjun@flowy.live
To save people a click, it's a pretty polished-looking tool that that allows always-on voice chat amongst a small team. It's a bit better than it sounds: you can opt in to specific channels, there's a nice system for playing back audio you missed or previously heard, and there's a priority system for channels.
It'd be absolutely ruinous for productivity to use every day, but I could see using it during a hackathon or during incident response as a way to increase communication bandwidth temporarily.
For something that's in a similar space as this (seriously, async meetings are pretty great), http://loom.com is pretty great. (don't work there, not even a paying customer, but even then it's transformed the way I work.)
But while I'm holding this loom-shaped hammer, the weekly status meeting is now this async thing where everyone makes a video to report their status and then we can all watch each other's report asynchronously instead of everybody having to be in the same virtual room at the same time. That's all, nothing earth-shattering, I don't think.
Our belief is that it's 2023 we shouldn't have to type anymore and speech to text is pretty good these days for those folks who like reading books vs listening to audiobooks. I prefer sitting back on my chair and listening to stuff at 1.5x speed.
Voice + video + screen real-time clips.
Your pair engineer can hold a button down and release and on my computer, I see it play on the bottom right of my screen. A loom killer in my opinion
But you can also do audio/video clips on teams or slack, the main difference being the UI.
You are not clicking play on 20 different clips, it smoothens clips together to make it like one conversation when it comes to playback. Many other elements when it comes to playback that are different than a typical thread on other platforms which would include files, code, text, voice clips, all in one stream which makes it death by thousand cuts in relation to a smooth human to human conversation.
omg this sounds like hell.
You choose who you get to hear "always-on" just like you choose which channels you tune into on a real walkie-talkie.
There is no global presence as that increases the anxiety of always-on.
Would you say there is not enough clear messaging to articulate that this is for you and just your core people and not everyone in the company? That Slack and everything serves a purpose but you and your core team needs to be on the same page. Or would that still decrease productivity in your opinion.
As for productivity, I don't think the size of the group changes the fundamental problem. For a lot of people, having the possibility of a coworker popping in and disrupting your concentration would be super annoying, even if it is only your immediate team. That's why, in open offices, people often wear big headphones to signal "don't talk to me unless it's important, I'm focusing right now."
That's why I think this would be super useful in cases where I'm willing to sacrifice focus for high-bandwidth communication. For example, during a company hackathon where I'm working with a small team and we're all batting around ideas super quickly. Or during an outage where the team trying to fix things needs to communicate fast. But for day-to-day work, even with my immediate team, I'd much rather rely on asynchronous and written communication that won't interrupt what I'm working on.
That makes sense, we need to try different messaging to hit it on the nail, but "walkie-talkie" seems to click as a decent initial introduction.
I totally agree. When I'm in flow state, I don't want anything to disturb me. Hence, I need a power switch, which is the power button in the widget. I'm a minimalist myself and having an off switch has been awesome for me, as compared to all of the configuration I have to do with Slack notifications to have it do what I want.
Thoughts on this?
What a nightmare, it's impossible to not see this being a top down app made by some dated management style.
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> Poor dude didn’t even last 24 hours.
I'm not a "badass", I'm a professional that get's work done. This makes me feel like I'm not going to want this product.
I think scheduling a time to talk and using this tool for the convo, is not inherently bad. That said though, at that point just use a Slack Huddle or Teams.
Thoughts?
Hyperactive teams need their main people (3-8 core people, and everyone has a different set of core people) to be a push of a button away. And this changes from week to week depending on the project and priorities.
Mind if I ask, are you on a team which tends towards longer sprint cycles and more waterfall, slower product development? Maybe your company values quality and stability instead of speed?
Nope, I don't believe this is priced anywhere near reality.
It's an interesting concept, but in no way shape or form is a voice-only chat app worth that cost, regardless of philosophy or aesthetics or feature-set. At that price point hiring developers to hack together something with Mux would be less expensive.
I truly do not understand how it's justified.
Thoughts?
Surely that's now 'Conversations happening in 21+ different apps.'?
What I miss more with modern conversation apps is a quake-terminal like UI. I personnally hate when my contacts use audios on instant messaging app as it makes things so much harder to search, prevent me from checking out messages while already on a call, etc.
We have live transcription and power search on the roadmap as this is a common objection. (audiobook vs. book argument)
Speech to text is pretty good these days, and it's 2023, we shouldn't be typing to talk in our opinion.
Search: "Play (or let me read) what Johnny told me about databases last month or so"
Me personally? When it comes to going back in a conversation, I prefer sitting back and listening at 2x speed about complex topics so that I can look across the room and think instead of staring at my screen reading essays.
I watched two of the videos.
The first video was about the problems that you typically have in a team and I think he hit the nail on the head there. It is frustrating with all the github emails and jira emails and slack notifications from 100 channels.
I was really hoping you had solved this or at least partially.
When I watched the second Jira I saw the product. I would describe it as potentially better than Slack but hard to be sure without using it. But I didn’t see how it solves the problems? Don’t I still have many channels, conversations etc. to track. And all the emails are still there!
Async voice chat may be great but I feel it is a leap of faith for me. You see the problem is where you have a company that is already on teams and slack, that product is embedded deeply across the org so at best if I try yours I will still need to keep slack going because the sales guys won’t switch (vice versa the sales guys use some cool communication tools but still need to run slack).
It might be different in small startups that could drop and switch in a decision made when chatting at the bar after work or whatever.
I guess in short I didn’t see the killer feature.
But… I am not an “early adopter” persona. I might get it once you are wildly successful.
What would be interesting and compelling would be say a YC startup that switched to it write a case study.
The motivating problems you mentioned are good ones to solve and I am keen to see them solved. I think the solution is a mix of software and management culture change and business skills training (efficient meetings etc.) and probably for 2023, some AI!
See the moonshot ideas we have in the "business" plan: https://flowy.live/pricing
Thank you!!
No, no I will absolutely not, and with no easy search when my ADHD finally reminds me that I forgot something and need to find the communication and a written record that I can then use to work off, this would not work for the team I am on.
Speech to text is pretty good these days, and it's 2023, we shouldn't be typing to talk in our opinion.
Search: "Play (or let me read) what Johnny told me about databases last month or so"
in my first unix tech support job at a big US bank, some bond trader would yell at us over the squawk box that they needed a new keyboard (because they'd just smashed it with the heavy handsets on their dealerbox/trading turret).
no jira back then!
It was very cool. There's been a pivot to live coding:
I liked the hanging out thing.
We actually still have the drop-in rooms.
The pivot if you're curious is because very few teams adopted the rooms just for hanging out. Instead people ended up doing work in them, like pair coding. So we decided to keep the rooms, but focus all our feature development and marketing on the collaborative features.
1: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-...
I'm not actually sure if the product _and_ company are named flowy, or if the company is flowy and the product is named talksik (from the screen recording). Your post here doesn't clarify, but I will stick with flowy for this reply.
Though I think that you'll have some difficulties in getting sales (who knows I might be totally incorrect). I say that for a couple of reasons:
1. I think with only 24 hours of history it is somewhat limited, let's say I work in Boston, what about the Friday afternoon message that my Seattle colleague sends me as I'm finishing up, I'll want to replay it on Monday morning but it won't be there. A save for later function would be helpful.
2. Let's imagine I am a potential investor, I ask you "what does flowy have to offer if Slack implements a voice message feature?" What is your answer? From your website I honestly don't know, sure it's not Slack, so there are no Slack channels with hundreds of people and that one person who hits @here, and at some companies Slack is like a social media network without the moderation or block button. But Slack offers a lot, a rich ecosystem of plugins / bots for one.
3. Slack (and Teams et al.) offer a written history (leaving aside the caveat of the edit button for the moment), if I forget the specifics of what my colleague and I agreed on last week I can go back to Slack and read the message thread, if we use flowy that history is gone without transcribing the message.
One place that I can see this tool being somewhat useful is as a secondary mode of communication between a handful of engineers. Numerous times a week I consider uninstalling Slack from my work laptop, but that would leave my close colleagues high and dry. flowy _could_ be a useful tool in combatting that. Though given that a company is already paying for Slack / Teams etc. they would rightfully be hesitant to purchase a subscription to flowy.
I am glad to see that you have screen-sharing included already because that is so integral to so many peoples workflows.
These are great points. talksik was just the line/display name of the user. We should clarify.
1. That's a great point. We have been juggling this recently. The pros of keeping it ephemeral is that people don't try to be so formal, and allow free-flowing conversation. And also most things resolve in a day, and if something is urgent, they will reach out again. However, the weekend case is interesting.
There is an additional anxiety if things stay for longer, however, we are considering allowing you to play back missed/unplayed clips older than 24 hours just like Snapchat.
2. This is what I would say: It's a new medium that closely mimics natural human conversation as opposed to the death by thousand cuts of any text based messaging platform. It's 2023, humans shouldn't type. We know that most people only have a 3-8 coworkers that are important and spend 80% of their time. They will use Slack for occasional social media-like usecase, but it's too noisy and flowy wins by doing less and being a place for focused execution.
In addition, Slack is all about being a knowledge base (as their acroynm), and they would have to cut everything and change their mission to get to the essense of human conversation that flowy is obsessed about.
Regardless, we beleive the market is huge and there is a cult of people who are dying for a "less is more" approach. Slack and Zoom and Loom are all due for this approach to team and human communication.
3. Great point again! We have live transcription and power search on the roadmap as this is a common objection. (audiobook vs. book argument)
Speech to text is pretty good these days, and it's 2023, we shouldn't be typing to talk in our opinion.
Search: "Play (or let me read) what Johnny told me about databases last month or so"
Me personally? I prefer sitting back and listening at 2x speed about complex topics so that I can look across the room and think instead of staring at my screen reading essays.
Sorry for the long response! You're points have been really helpful. Your last point is spot on! Flowy is only for you and your core team. We need to articulate that more clearly as it seems to be assumed that it's a Slack alternative from the getgo (although for startups, it may very well be with a email + flowy combination).
The death by a thousand cuts is real. Where I work we use Slack for nearly everything, we pretty much only have email addresses to login to Slack and AWS.
I have definitely found with the diverse bunch of people that I work with, that some people are very articulate in writing and some are very articulate in verbal communication. My personal experience is that people with English as a second language (in general) prefer written communication (they also write the best docs too). While native English speakers tend to prefer verbal communication for its ease and because of their comfort with it.
One piece of advice from me to you is to be careful of relying on speech to text for two main reasons: 1. Consider proper nouns, the products or tools that your customers are building or using. An example, I say "emacs", Siri on my phone thinks that should be "IMAX". Another example is `grep`, Siri thinks that ought to be "grape". Perhaps users would be able to define their proper nouns for flowy.
2. Despite having fluent English that is understandable to the vast majority of people, speech to text systems really struggle to understand me because I do not speak in a flat American accent. Perhaps it's just me :shrug:
Still, I have seen that these folks still have presentations in English and with diagraming and such, they are able to articulate something that's more digestible than full on documentation. I think loom sort of videos would still be good for these people to diagram and demo things. We want to add something like this with video + screen broadcasting.
Yep speech to text won't be fluent with technical terms. I'm hoping it does 80% of the job, and then constantly improve it based on what you mentioned. Thanks for the suggestions! Perhaps starting with editable speech to text would be viable, while trying hard not to promote async communication to a point where people aren't conversing naturally as humans do but constantly stopping, editing and typing.
After downloading the application, I am getting more accustomed to this unconventional tool in interacting with my peers. I could see how the nature of such a product could grow into something more powerful that can address multiple comms-based problems across multiple teams!
Much of the vision is in the demo; however, I strongly suggest to download the application and utilize it amongst a core group of people that you communicate with! I'm also experimenting with the viability of using this for teams working in my startup, and so far, initial sentiment is positive!
The home page should really show a few static screenshots of the app, highlight the core functionality and use cases. And explain it's an audio app. Currently it's mostly marketing fluff, which is not exactly the best way to reach the target audience of developers.
We will be adding in a clearer display of features just like this Apple airpods page: https://www.apple.com/airpods-3rd-generation/
That is a great point about "marketing fluff". Really appreciate this!
I honestly don't understand how this would be different than using slack (perhaps with text-to-speech). The marginal added benefit of async voice (as opposed to text) chat just doesn't seem that compelling (and in many ways seems significantly worse, like the inability to search). Certainly not enough to add another comms tool to the pile. But maybe I'm missing something.
We have live transcription and power search on the roadmap as this is a common objection. (audiobook vs. book argument)
Speech to text is pretty good these days, and it's 2023, we shouldn't be typing to talk in our opinion.
Search: "Play (or let me read) what Johnny told me about databases last month or so"
Me personally? I prefer sitting back and listening at 2x speed about complex topics so that I can look across the room and think instead of staring at my screen reading essays.
Oh, like a cockpit voice recorder. That sounds way more useful than just a walkie-talkie. (Most of my team is in-person already)
Being able to permalink into a real-life conversation would be neat. A walkie-talkie alone wouldn't help me much because I'm in-person most of the time, and I'm picky about writing down anything that's said aloud.
tbh I still probably wouldn't want to use it. I hate the sound of my own voice, even more than the average person.
We used to do "Real-time voice commz for teams" but it didn't click for people.
Thanks for the feedback! We are thinking through composing audio clips instead of just broadcasting immediately. From there, can imagine a world where we undo send. All to reduce anxiety and enable more free-flowing conversation. However, it may have the opposite effect, which is why we want to keep it simple for now.
Appreciate this regardless! Especially the analogy!
You choose who you hear. No notifications for anything else. No global presence as that would bring back the "always-on" feeling of slack.
Your friend, Hammy
We think the philosophy that flowy is built on is the only reason it will beat other standards that we have just lived with: We live in a distracted world. We used to shuffle paper, now we shuffle 20+ apps merely trying to say a few words to each other.
On the product side, we focus on how we can make this more like a natural human conversation. This results in reduced cognitive load and easier conversational flow.
as well but I’m afraid the comments were mostly negative.